The Urchin's Song

by Rita Bradshaw

Weighed down with her purchases she didn’t notice the figure just behind her as she turned into Northumberland Place, so when a hand touched her on the shoulder she nearly jumped out of her skin. ‘Oh! Oh, Prudence.’ In her fright, she had nearly dropped the big parcel of meat which the butcher had tied up with string for her and now, as she adjusted her packages, she was surprised yet again when Prudence said pleasantly, ‘Can I help? Let me take that for you. I thought it was you but I wasn’t sure until you turned round.’

  Josie’s hands passed the parcel of meat to Prudence, but she was looking at the other girl’s face. Prudence looked so different! And yet she was still the same physically, although . . . her hair was clean and shining, and her eyes had a different expression in them, a brightness which seemed to nullify their muddy shade and bring out the green . . . Josie became aware she was staring and said quickly, ‘Thank you. I’m only up for the day but Vera has invited me to dinner and so I thought I’d get a few things by way of thanks.’

  Prudence nodded. ‘She’ll tell you off, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ They smiled at each other and again Josie was struck by the almost tangible happiness radiating from Barney’s sister.

  ‘I’m glad I’ve seen you. By yourself, that is.’ Prudence swallowed before she continued, ‘You’ve done very well for yourself and . . . and I’m glad. I mean that.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Josie didn’t know what else to say.

  ‘I wasn’t very nice to you, was I?’ Prudence’s sallow skin had flushed with embarrassment and Josie’s cheeks were also turning pink. ‘In fact, I wasn’t very nice to anyone in those days.’

  ‘Look, it’s all water under the bridge.’

  ‘No, no, let me say it, Josie. I’ve thought about writing to you to apologise but . . .’ Prudence shook her head helplessly. ‘Well, I didn’t. But I’m sorry for how I was.’

  ‘You were unhappy,’ Josie said gently, the other girl’s humility so out of character that she felt as though she was talking to someone else.

  ‘Aye, I was.’ Prudence stretched her neck and moved her chin from side to side before she said, ‘And you were so pretty, and me da thought the sun shone out of your backside from the minute you walked through the door, Barney an’ all. Pearl knew that, you know, deep in the heart of her. She knew she should never have married him once you showed up. She knew how he felt about you long before he did.’

  Josie was utterly at a loss as to what to say. She wondered if Prudence was accusing her of anything, but then the other girl disabused her of that notion when she went on, ‘But it weren’t your fault, I know that now. Georgie - oh, he’s my young man,’ here Prudence’s cheeks got still pinker, ‘he calls a spade a spade, does Georgie, and we’ve talked a lot about the past. It’s made me see things different.’ Prudence didn’t say here that all the talking had led Georgie to say that unless Prudence got herself sorted out he couldn’t see a future for them. She had been hurt then, and it had been a while before she could accept that maybe Georgie had a point. He’d gone mad when she’d said to him that he was on Josie’s side like everyone else, and then she’d cried and the upshot of it all had been he had taken her in his arms for the first time and kissed her . . .

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘Aye, well, I just wanted you to know.’

  As they began to walk on, side by side now, Josie said, ‘I’m going to do a few weeks at the Palace and the Royal soon and it would be grand to think I could call on Vera and you wouldn’t mind me coming?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t mind.’ This wasn’t quite true but to Prudence’s credit it didn’t show in her voice. She knew she would never be able to find it within herself to actually like Josie, and she didn’t fancy the idea of her old enemy being around for however short a time it might be, but now she had a different life - now she had Georgie - she could stomach what had to be stomached. But it wasn’t only Josie’s presence for its own sake she didn’t like the idea of; it was him, that man, Patrick Duffy. Her coming here might be dangerous.

  Should she come clean and tell Josie about her conversations with the little Irishman? Looking back now she couldn’t imagine why she had let Duffy talk to her in the first place. It was the one thing she hadn’t confided to Georgie, but now Josie had come back perhaps she ought to warn her. Georgie would be disgusted if anything happened and it came out she’d known Duffy had it in for this woman.

  She had only talked to Duffy twice more since that first time, and only then because he had appeared from seemingly nowhere when she’d been shopping and it had been difficult to get rid of him without being rude. And there was something about him, something unnerving, which had stopped her taking that tack. The man frightened her. She’d had the skitters for days afterwards each time she’d seen him.

  He had always been careful not to come right out with it and say he wanted to harm Josie. He’d always referred to her as ‘our mutual friend’ but the tone of his voice had been enough to let Prudence know what he really meant. ‘Wanting to renew the little lady’s acquaintance.’ ‘Wanting to show the little lady in what high regard I hold her.’ ‘Wanting the little lady to meet some old friends of mine who have a lot to thank her for.’ That had been the way Patrick Duffy had talked. And he’d only inferred what he’d inferred because he knew about her part in the attack on Josie in Newcastle.

  As Prudence followed Josie into Vera’s house her stomach lurched sickeningly. He had thought she would help him, and somehow that made her feel unclean, that a man like Duffy thought she would be his accomplice. When she had gone to Josie’s father all those years ago she hadn’t realised the type of man he really was; she hadn’t believed Josie, that was the thing. But meeting Duffy, hearing him talk, she believed it all right. Oh aye, she did. And after the last time of seeing Duffy, twelve months back and more, she’d made sure she only went shopping when Vera was with her, and she’d come straight home at nights with no dilly-dallying. And then Georgie had spoken to her at work one day and asked her to go to the Olympia with him one night, and from that point on everything had changed. Or perhaps it was her that had changed.

  The thing was, Georgie cared about people - really cared - and he was hot on the trade unions and social reform and everything like that, but in a doing way. He’d made her recall the times she and Barney had spouted on about such things to their da but with only head knowledge, not heart. At least on her side anyway.

  The more she’d seen of Georgie the more she had realised the madness of what she had done all those years ago. Georgie had opened her eyes to all sorts of goings-on that happened when folk didn’t have two farthings to rub together. She had helped him in the soup kitchen which had been set up at Christmas for the down and outs, and there had been little bairns come in who had been in a terrible state. She had always considered herself working class and poor with it, her da being a miner and all, but she’d learned a thing or two since she’d been courting Georgie.

  She couldn’t remember a Christmas as a bairn when the stockings she and the lads had hung up hadn’t been full of nuts and dolly mixtures and brand new pennies, just minted, along with a toy car or a little fort for the lads and a sweetshop or shilling doll for her. But these bairns didn’t know what a toy was. Starving, filthy, cold and lice-ridden, most of them had looked like little old men and women. Oh aye, she’d learned a thing or two since she had been seeing Georgie, and all that had been related about Josie’s beginnings had come back to her, but this time she’d believed it.

  She hadn’t been able to bring herself to admit to Georgie that she’d spoken to Patrick Duffy though. Deep inside she’d been scared that Georgie might begin to look at her with different eyes, especially after everything else she’d confessed. He still might, if she let on. Georgie thought she was a decent woman and she was, she was a decent woman. At heart she was.

  ‘You all right, lass?’ As Vera touched Prudence on the arm, the younger woman realised she had been staring vacantly at them all. She brought the sm
ile back to her face, nodding brightly as she said, ‘Aye, I’m grand, Vera. Here, Josie’s been buying up the shop I reckon,’ as she handed Vera the parcel of meat.

  Vera smiled back at her, obviously relieved and pleased at the lack of animosity in the air, and Prudence thought, I can’t, I just can’t tell them. It’ll spoil everything. And there’s no need, not really. Josie’ll be come and gone again in a few weeks, back to her fine house and rich husband. If I say anything and I lose Georgie, what’ll I have left? Nowt, that’s what. And I can’t lose him, I can’t. Patrick Duffy’s got other fish to fry now and it must be nigh on twelve months since I’ve seen hide or hair of him. No, least said, soonest mended.

  It’d be all right. ’Course it would . . .

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Josie walked into the house at the back of the Caledonian Market at just after three in the afternoon the next day, and half an hour later Oliver was knocking on the door and demanding to see her.

  ‘It’s all right, Agnes.’ Josie had stepped out of Lily’s sitting room into the hall when she had heard Oliver remonstrating with the housekeeper who had refused him entrance. ‘I’ll talk to Mr Hogarth in here.’

  Lily and Gertie left the room hastily at this point, and as Oliver paused in the hall to let them pass Josie saw Gertie smile at him. It was a small thing but suddenly Josie felt very angry and it steadied her racing heart and churning stomach. ‘Won’t you come this way?’ She could have been talking to a stranger, her words cool and polite, and she saw his eyes flicker at her tone before she turned and walked back into the sitting room. Agnes cleared away their makeshift beds first thing each morning and when the alterations to the three houses had been planned, Josie had made sure Lily’s sitting room was a very comfortable one and had furnished it at no small cost.

  She walked across to the large ornate fireplace which had no fire in it today before she faced him again, and she saw him glancing round the room with an expression of surprise on his face. ‘This is very nice.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she said stiffly.

  ‘I . . . I would have come before but I was not able to leave the Conways’ until early this morning on doctor’s advice.’ She did not reply to this, and he went on, ‘Josie, you have to believe this is not as it seems.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes you do, you do. I wouldn’t . . . I can understand how it appeared and why you put the worst possible construction on what you saw, but there is an explanation.’

  ‘I have no doubt about that, Oliver. You spent the night with your mistress.’

  ‘That is not what I meant and you know it.’

  ‘I know that that woman has always hated me because in her eyes I took you away from her. She’s been insolent and unfriendly from the first time I met her and you have always found excuses for her. I thought it was because you felt sorry for her and perhaps just a little guilty, and I was foolish enough to think it didn’t matter; that she was just a rather unpleasant and perhaps even pitiable individual. I know better now. She dared to be the way she was because you were still sharing her bed.’

  Oliver gazed at her in amazement. ‘Are you mad, woman?’ he said loudly. ‘When on earth was I ever away from you long enough to conduct an affair with anyone?’

  ‘Most evenings,’ she shot back bitterly.

  ‘You know where I was then. Damn it all, haven’t we had more altercations about my gambling than the grains of sand on the seashore?’

  ‘It is not exactly beyond the bounds of possibility that you could manage to fit both pastimes into an evening,’ she said with heavy sarcasm.

  ‘For crying out loud!’

  ‘And don’t shout, not unless you wish me to terminate this conversation right now.’

  ‘Josie, I swear to you on everything I hold sacred, I have not been conducting an affair with her! Damn it all, woman, I haven’t had the time or the money or the inclination.’

  Somehow she believed him suddenly about that, but it didn’t make any difference to what had happened at the weekend. And she said as much. ‘Be that as it may, you were in her bed this weekend and that is once too much for me. I want a divorce, Oliver.’

  He was nearly as stunned as he had been when he’d hit his head on the side of the open door and it showed. He stared at her blankly and then said, ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘Oh I am, Oliver. I am completely serious.’

  It took him a split second to reach her and she had no time to evade his touch as he gripped her forearms in his hands. This close, her senses immediately registered the familiar pleasant smell which emanated from his skin and the overall bigness of him, but she made no reaction whatsoever, not even to struggle. Instead, in a small hard cold voice, she said, ‘Let go of me, please.’

  ‘Not till you listen to me, damn it. I love you. I’ve always loved you. The night in question I had too much to drink, I admit it. There were a group of us playing cards and some of the ladies had stayed on, just one or two.’

  ‘Of which your whore was one.’

  She heard his teeth grind before he said, ‘The next thing I know, you are pounding on the door and I’ve got a head like a drum. But I had been lying on the chaise-longue, not the bed; my back was nearly breaking because of it. I told Steven this and he made some enquiries, and Jefferson came clean.’

  Jefferson. She might have known he had something to do with this. He was a crony of Stella’s and she had always disliked the tall, foppish young man who giggled behind his hand like a woman.

  ‘Apparently it was a joke; Jefferson thought it was a joke, anyway. Most everyone had gone up to bed apart from Jefferson and one of his friends and Stella, and I’d passed out some time before in one of the easy chairs. It was suggested they carry me up to Stella’s room.’

  ‘As Jefferson hasn’t got the imagination of a gnat, may I surmise the suggestion came from the female of the species? If indeed what you are telling me is the truth?’

  ‘It is, I swear it. They carried me up’ - here Oliver’s voice hardened and Josie could imagine his reaction to being unknowingly handled - ‘but when they got me to Stella’s room and tried undressing me I came round enough to lash out at all and sundry, and so they gave it up as a bad job and left me on the chaise-longue.’

  ‘And is that it? You expect me to believe that story?’

  ‘Yes, I damn well do because it’s what happened.’ He shook her slightly. ‘And don’t forget the reason for my intoxication was down to you, you and your notion of separate bank accounts and the like. You would make me a laughing stock.’

  ‘I think you have managed to do that very nicely yourself, ’ Josie said icily, ‘and don’t manhandle me, Oliver.’

  ‘Manhandle you? You’re my wife.’

  ‘It’s a pity you didn’t remember that on Friday night.’

  When she found herself almost flung down on to the sofa at the side of them she realised Oliver was at the end of his tether, even before he hung over her and ground out, ‘I have told you the truth, damn it all! Why the hell would I make up a story like that - and more to the point, why would I let Jefferson spread it round, like he undoubtedly will, if it isn’t the truth? There would have been some credit to being found in the bed of a beauty like Stella Stratton, but to be in one’s cups and spend the night on the chaise-longue at the foot of the bed! I’ll never live it down. And you, behaving like a madwoman and raising the whole house!’

  ‘I did not behave like a madwoman,’ Josie protested through lips she was desperately trying to stop trembling. ‘Merely a wife who finds her husband in the bed of another woman.’

  ‘And when I fought Jefferson and the others to stop them putting me in Stella’s bed, that was because even in my drunken state I must have known she wasn’t you,’ Oliver said, more softly now. ‘Don’t you see? Jefferson said when she tried to calm me down and put her arms round me I almost sent her across the other side of the room. That was the point I was deposited on the sofa. Josie, I know our marriage
is not all it should be, and I can’t in all honesty say I’ll ever be what the world would call a good husband, but I can say I am yours. Perhaps it was naive of me to continue a friendship of sorts with Stella, but as you so rightly sensed, I felt guilty. I make stupid decisions like that, I gamble too much and I drink too much, and I am far more suited to a selfish bachelor existence than that of a married man, but I have never betrayed you and I will never betray you.’

  She stared at him. She believed him; she believed him and she loved him in a fashion, so why did she suddenly feel as if the weight of the world had been placed on her shoulders? She should be happy, shouldn’t she? Happy she hadn’t got to go through the horror of a divorce and the ostracism which would result from all quarters except in her chosen profession; happy he hadn’t shared Stella’s bed again; happy life could go on as before?

  ‘I’m going to cut right down on the gambling, you’ll see. And we can think about buying that little property and having a child. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

  He had slipped down on to the sofa beside her and now he was holding her so tightly it hurt.

  ‘Anything you want, my angel. Anything,’ he murmured as he kissed the top of her head before moving to her brow and then her lips. ‘But you can’t leave me. I wouldn’t want to live without you. Make your own conditions but end this nonsense.’

  It was some moments before she stirred, and then she said against his mouth, ‘Oliver? I have something to tell you, about my sisters. The ones who ran away.’ Anything, he had said. ‘And about where I went today . . .’

  Chapter Twenty-three

  ‘So you’re telling me she was up here herself, and you told her I managed the Avenue and she still went to the Palace and the Royal? That’s what you’re saying?’

  ‘Don’t take it like that, lad.’

  ‘How else do you expect me to take it, Vera, eh? How else? What am I supposed to have done that I don’t merit a “hello” or “how are you?”, let alone the chance to book her for a couple of weeks? She comes straight to see you; she even spends most of the evening here with Prudence - no offence, Pru,’ his sister, who was sitting at the kitchen table eating her dinner, nodded stolidly but said nothing, ‘and then she’s off without so much as a by your leave. She must know that a big London name gives the numbers a boost, and the fact that she’s a born-and-bred Sunderland lass will bring ’em in in their droves.’